Frank Stella was one of the key figures in 20th-century art helping give rise to Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting. FRANK STELLA - FORMIDABLE magazine - American contemporary artist
Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York.
Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more". This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint.
Frank Stella gained recognition with his series of coolly impersonal black striped paintings which follow a natural progression of dynamism, tactility, and scale: first, by expanding his initial monochrome palette to bright colors, and, later, moving painting into the third dimension through the incorporation of other, non-painterly elements onto the canvas.
Frank Stella was one of the key figures in 20th-century art helping give rise to Minimalism, Post-Painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting. FRANK STELLA - FORMIDABLE magazine - American contemporary artist












Joseph Beuys (12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German Fluxus, happening, and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist, and pedagogue.
His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate and only rarely acrimonious open public debates on a very wide range of subjects including political, environmental, social and long term cultural trends. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Find the latest shows, biography, and artworks for sale by Joseph Beuys. A major figure of the postwar German avant-garde, Joseph Beuys viewed art as a vehic...
(January 24, 1915 – July 16, 1991)
Robert Motherwell, a major figure of the Abstract Expressionist generation, encompassed both the expressive brushwork of action painting and the breadth of scale and saturated hues of color field painting. He was a member of the New York School, a term he coined, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
Robert Motherwell was an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School (a phrase he coined), which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.
During the late 1940s and 1950s Motherwell spent much of his time lecturing and teaching; he taught at Black Mountain College, NC, in 1950, and from 1951 to 1959 at Hunter College, New York. He also worked on three influential editorial projects: the Documents of Modern Art series, which he initiated in 1944 and which included his most important literary contribution to the history of modern art, the Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York, 1951); Possibilities magazine, from 1947; and Modern Artists in America (New York, 1951), which he co-authored with Ad Reinhardt.
In 1940, Motherwell moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he was encouraged by Meyer Schapiro to devote himself to painting rather than scholarship. Shapiro introduced the young artist to a group of exiled Parisian Surrealists (Max Ernst, Duchamp, Masson) and arranged for Motherwell to study with Kurt Seligmann. The time that Motherwell spent with the Surrealists proved to be influential to his artistic process. After a 1941 voyage with Roberto Matta to Mexico—on a boat where he met Maria, an actress and his future wife—Motherwell decided to make painting his primary vocation. The sketches Motherwell made in Mexico later evolved into his first important paintings, such as Little Spanish Prison (1941), and Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive (1943), both in the MoMA collection).
It was Matta who introduced Motherwell to the concept of “automatic” drawings. The Surrealists often deployed the process of automatism, or abstract “automatic” doodling to tap into their unconscious. This concept had a lasting effect on Motherwell, but it was conceptually changed, when Motherwell met Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico and decided to prolong his stay and to spend several months in his studio. Motherwell´s famous Mexican Sketchbook visually reflect this conceptual change: while the first drawings are somehow analyzing copies of examples by Matta and Tanguy, the drawings, done in Paalen´s atelier or during his studies with Paalen show more plane graphic cadences, swelling ink-spots as a pictorial access to yet unseen or possible figurations, remembering the fumage-spots which also relinquished traditional aspects of perspective and suggested swelling ephemeral shapes. It was also Paalen who introduced Motherwell to André Breton with an introduction letter. The consequences and influences on various levels and on other American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and William Baziotes, whom Motherwell befriended in New York after a trip to Mexico, are not finally explored. In 1991, shortly before he died, Motherwell remembered a "conspiracy of silence" regarding Paalen´s innovative role in the genesis of Abstract Expressionism.
Upon return from Mexico Motherwell spent time developing his creative principle based on automatism: "what I realized was that Americans potentially could paint like angels but that there was no creative principle around, so that everybody who liked modern art was copying it. Gorky was copying Picasso. Pollock was copying Picasso. De Kooning was copying Picasso. I mean I say this unqualifiedly. I was painting French intimate pictures or whatever. And all we needed was a creative principle, I mean something that would mobilize this capacity to paint in a creative way, and that's what Europe had that we hadn't had; we had always followed in their wake. And I thought of all the possibilities of free association—because I also had a psychoanalytic background and I understood the implications—might be the best chance to really make something entirely new which everybody agreed was the thing to do."
Thus, in the early 1940s, Robert Motherwell played a significant role in laying the foundations for the new movement of Abstract Expressionism (or the New York School): "Matta wanted to start a revolution, a movement, within Surrealism. He asked me to find some other American artists that would help start a new movement. It was then that Baziotes and I went to see Pollock and de Kooning and Hofmann and Kamrowski and Busa and several other people. And if we could come with something. Peggy Guggenheim who liked us said that she would put on a show of this new business. And so I went around explaining the theory of automatism to everybody because the only way that you could have a movement was that it had some common principle. It sort of all began that way."
Action painting, sometimes called "gestural abstraction", is a style of painting in which paint is spontaneously dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas, rather than being carefully applied. The resulting work often emphasizes the physical act of painting itself as an essential aspect of the finished work or concern of its artist. The preceding art of Kandinsky and Mondrian had freed itself from the portrayal of objects and instead tried to evoke, address and delineate, through the aesthetic sense, emotions and feelings within the viewer. Action painting took this a step further, using both Jung and Freud’s ideas of the subconscious as its underlying foundations. The paintings of the Action painters were not meant to portray objects per se or even specific emotions. Instead they were meant to touch the observer deep in the subconscious mind, evoking a sense of the primeval and tapping the collective sense of an archetypal visual language. This was done by the artist painting "unconsciously," and spontaneously, creating a powerful arena of raw emotion and action, in the moment. Action painting was clearly influenced by the surrealist emphasis on automatism which (also) influenced by psychoanalysis claimed a more direct access to the subconscious mind. Important exponents of this concept of art making were the painters Joan Miró and André Masson. However the action painters took everything the surrealists had done a step further.
It is essential for the understanding of action painting to place it in historical context. A product of the post-World War II artistic resurgence of expressionism in America and more specifically New York City, action painting developed in an era where quantum mechanics and psychoanalysis were beginning to flourish and were changing people's perception of the physical and psychological world; and civilization’s understanding of the world through heightened self-consciousness and awareness.
source: wikipedia.org



















Yves Klein was a leader of the Nouveau réalisme movement, and considered an important figure in post-war European art. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art. His short career was characterized by many radical gestures, often touched with his flair for spectacle.
His exhibition, 'Proposte Monocrome, Epoca Blu' (Proposition Monochrome; Blue Epoch) at the Gallery Apollinaire, Milan, (January 1957), featured 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin 'Rhodopas,' described by Klein as "The Medium." Discovered with the help of Edouard Adam, a Parisian paint dealer, the optical effect retained the brilliance of the pigment which, when suspended in linseed oil, tended to become dull. Klein later deposited a Soleau envelope for this recipe to maintain the "authenticity of the pure idea." This colour, reminiscent of the lapis lazuli used to paint the Madonna's robes in medieval paintings, was to become known as International Klein Blue. The paintings were attached to poles placed 20 cm away from the walls to increase their spatial ambiguities.
The show was a critical and commercial success, traveling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London. The Parisian exhibition, at the Iris Clert Gallery in May 1957, became a seminal happening. To mark the opening, 1001 blue balloons were released and blue postcards were sent out using IKB stamps that Klein had bribed the postal service to accept as legitimate. Concurrently, an exhibition of tubs of blue pigment and fire paintings was held at Galerie Collette Allendy.
Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962.












Uschi Obermaier was a key figure of the sexual revolution, even influencing John Lennon and Yoko Ono with her credo of free love. She is known to have had affairs with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Jimi Hendrix.
Uschi Obermaier was a key figure of the sexual revolution, even influencing John Lennon and Yoko Ono with her credo of free love. She is known to have had affairs with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Jimi Hendrix.












Neo-expressionism is a style of late-modernist or early-postmodern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilden ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term). It is characterized by intense subjectivity and rough handling of materials.
Neo-expressionism developed as a reaction against conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body, (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way, often using vivid colors. It was overtly inspired by German Expressionist painters, such as Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, James Ensor and Edvard Munch. It is also related to American Lyrical Abstraction painting of the 1960s and 1970s, The Hairy Who movement in Chicago, the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop Painting.